Archive for January, 2012

We are well-aware of how very many of you, our faithful fans, have been waiting for months for this announcement, so – with no further ado, we are excited to unveil the newest addition to our GreenPois0n toolkit…

Untethered Jailbreak for iPhone 4S & iPad 2 !

This release should come as no surprise to those of you who have been following pod2g’s iOS blogfor the past few months. Earlier this week, you might have even wet your pants a little when you watched the video demonstration of today’s release (named Absinthe A5) and first witnessed our jailbreak working its magic to liberate both the iPhone 4S & iPad 2. What you may not fully realize yet is just how hard the exploits in this Apple A5 jailbreak are working behind the scenes – and, though I mentioned it last week on my Twitter – what a glorious hacker’s wet dream the Absinthe A5 toolkit has ultimately evolved into!

Hacking the A5: Not Exactly a Walk in the Park

The ridiculously complex combination of exploits-within-exploits that make this iOS jailbreak possible have consumed thousands of hours of brain-power & effort from a legion of world-renowned hackers, several of whom have been working diligently on this project since the dual-core A5 processor was unveiled by Apple last March. Ten months ago, I myself was live tweetingfrom a tediously long line at the nearest Apple retail store, where I anxiously waited to become one of the world’s first owners (& hackers) of the newly-released iPad 2. At that point, I don’t know if any iOS hacker anticipated how much the A5 chip would completely change the game & up the stakes. The endless war we fight to jailbreak has become more & more difficult with each new device released, and our recent battle against A5 only proved this further. After working for months with few tangible results, Chronic Dev hackers tried a new approach – we launched CDevReporter to accumulate all your devices’ crash reports, an invaluable source of information for iOS hacking & research. You answered our call-to-arms quickly & emphatically, sending us more than 10 million of these reports in less than a week. (Keep up the good work!) Meanwhile, the iPhone 4S was released with resounding success – more than four million deviceswere sold in the first weekend alone. As a result, demand for an untethered A5 jailbreak grew exponentially overnight, and a mob-like mentality was adopted by many of the (usually courteous) Apple fan-kids. Suddenly, every iOS hacker found himself the target of constant clamoring – on Twitter, in our (& other) blog’s comments, in forums & tech news blurbs. Their message was loud & clear: “We want our new iPhones jailbroken, & we want it NOW!”

Introducing the 2012 iOS Hacking “Dream Team”

We finally admitted that the escalated obstacles presented by Apple’s new A5 processor would not likely be overcome by one individual or team – but all together, we should be more than able to conquer any challenges encountered. As such, a diverse group of iOS hackers all decided to set aside our personal goals & egos, relax our die-hard team loyalties, and pool our respective skill-sets, talents & exploits to form an iOS Super-Hacking “Dream Team.” Numerous prominent iOS hackers contributed time & expertise to the project through their troubleshooting, brilliant obstacle-clearing ideas & other support. We’d like to extend special thanks to saurik & MuscleNerd, both core members of iPhone Dev Team. Of the 4 hackers who deserve extra recognition & gratitude for completing the lion’s share of the research, development & programming of this jailbreak, 3 are members of Chronic Dev Team: myself (posixninja), pod2g & nikias. The fourth & most legendary member of our “Dream Team” is planetbeing, the globally-admired iOS hacker/developer responsible for initially porting both Linux & Android to the iPhone (among his many other contributions). As to the amazingly innovative fusion of exploits used in this iOS jailbreak – we plan to save most of that discussion for a panel/presentation we hope to give at a conference later this year. If you want to learn more now, pod2g wrote an excellent blog post after the release of Corona, in which he describes in detail the userland & kernel exploits we used, both for the A4 iOS 5.0.1 untethered jailbreak and as a starting point for this Absinthe A5 toolkit.

Help Advance our Ongoing iOS Research & Support the Future of Jailbreaks!

To jailbreak your iPhone 4S (running iOS 5.0 or either 4S version of 5.0.1**) and/or your iPad 2 (all Wi-Fi only, GSM & CDMA devices supported;must be running iOS 5.0.1**) – select one of the links below to download your Absinthe A5 untethered jailbreak. Simply unzip the file, then install on your iOS A5 mobile device with one click of a button! As always MacOSX version is being released first, and Windows and Linux versions will be released shortly after.

**NOTE: If you haven’t yet heeded the advice I gave weeks ago – before you take one step further, upgrade your firmware to iOS 5.0.1 NOW! (Unless you need an iPhone4s Unlock) Also, we don’t mean to beat you over the head with this warning, but please remember: you should notupdate to iOS 5.0.2 when it’s released, or you will lose your jailbreak! Bookmark our GreenPois0n blog now, and be the first to know the next time we advise our jailbreak users to safely update their iOS firmware. As with all our previous GreenPois0n releases, should you run into any bugs in the A5 jailbreak, leave us a comment below or contact us on Twitter (via Chronic Dev Team, GreenPois0n, or directly to “Dream Team” hackers posixninja, pod2g or nikias). Even if we aren’t able to respond to your messages individually, we depend on all users to let us know about any issues you run into so that we can address them & fix the most-reported problems as quickly as possible. Muchas Gracias

First & foremost, THANK YOU to all our loyal fans & readers for your enduring patience over the past several months. We’ve been toiling night & day in order to perform the serious hacking ninja magic required to develop the most advanced iPhone jailbreak yet – we only hope it was worth your wait! And as always, thank you for your never-ending support of Chronic Dev Team & all our GreenPois0n releases! I also want to express my personal gratitude to:

saurik – for all your guidance & support, especially in helping us out of the sandbox, and for acting as administrator to the “Dream Team” donation fund;

Chronic-Dev, LLC – for hosting the web servers that will inevitably crash due to the sheer number of simultaneous download requests; and

finally & especially, the other “Dream Team” members – for all your expertise, dedication, cooperation & countless hours of hard work! It was a true pleasure to work closely with each of you, and without your contributions, this jailbreak would not have been possible.